


The Tapestry Woman

by Bitterblue



Category: Bitterblue - Kristin Cashore, Fire - Kristin Cashore, Graceling - Kristin Cashore, Seven Kingdoms Trilogy - Kristin Cashore
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-14
Updated: 2012-06-14
Packaged: 2017-11-07 17:19:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/433551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bitterblue/pseuds/Bitterblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The land itself is astoundingly green, the sort of colour that lends inverted images to the insides of her eyelids when she blinks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Tapestry Woman

**Author's Note:**

> For Nina.

Everything is  _beautiful._   
  
Katsa thinks she has prepared her mind after the revelations about the rat, and the possibility that Leck had told the truth about some things after all. She has made it past the heartache of missing Po, again--always again, never long enough to recover from the last set of bruises, so that she is starting to suspect her heart will always be sore with coming or going from him. She has made it past the tunnel, unpleasant to match her mood. She has made it past a puma the colour of sunrise, which had been harder than she expected--a lesson she took gladly. A rat is one thing. A predator is another.  
  
The land itself is astoundingly green, the sort of colour that lends inverted images to the insides of her eyelids when she blinks. Katsa isn't sure she'll ever believe anything else is green again, in comparison. She smiles to think how Skye would react to a sky this pure a blue, as clear and deep as Lienid sapphires as she walks on what is obviously a road, a human road, towards an unknown place. Someone has put a road there. Katsa will follow it.  
  
The unknown place becomes farms, then hamlets, and then a city, clearly the ideal Leck had strived so hard to emulate. Black towers glisten in mist thrown up by the largest waterfall she has seen. Undaunted by the crowds, filled with unfamiliar language and beautiful, dark skin that reminds her of Po's after long summers spent outside, she goes to what she assumes must be the palace gates.  
  
A woman meets her there, dressed in muted grey-blues that are so comparatively dull against the backdrop of her city that Katsa barely registers them at all. She is wearing a headscarf, and she is at least as old as Ror, though it doesn't quite show on her face in the usual ways. Her eyes are as green as the grass and trees and plants that had so captivated Katsa weeks before. She leads Katsa inside the gates, to a private garden, allowing her hood to fall back when they sit.  
  
She is the woman from the tapestry in Bitterblue's library. There can be no other with that hair. Katsa can't help but stare, the cascade of pink-red-gold-silver braids eating into her heart and mending the bruises Po had left behind there. And she was meant to be dangerous--a mind reader. A terrible mind reader.  
  
The old woman laughs, a sad, soft noise.  _Not dangerous_ , comes a wisp of a thought through the defenses Katsa has begun to put in place. _ I'm too old for that. And this is the easiest way to speak, privately, when we do not speak each others' languages very well at all. I have so many things to say to you, Lady Graceling. And so many questions to ask. _  
  
Katsa watches her, apprehensive, and cannot stop the thought that rushes out of her unprovoked:  
  
"How is everything here so  _beautiful_?"  
  
She smiles, teeth startlingly white against her brown skin. _ Let me tell you the recent history of my people, Lady Graceling_. Sitting under an enormous tree of no variety she knows, Katsa listens--sees, in shimmering images that move across her vision as much as anything real could do--and begins to understand how they are connected.  



End file.
